Getting the Word Out about LRP Games

We are really awful at advertising our games. A significant proportion of our friends miss announcements about what we’re planning to run, so expecting strangers to be aware is a mistake. There are few photos of most of the games that are run, and those that do exist rarely show the setting well. I’m not aware of any public reviews of our games. We have feedback from our players, but we don’t release the information. Given the speed with which our games were selling out and the way the people who played often talk about them I don’t doubt they were interesting games. However, they are already beyond the awareness of most LRPers, and I’ve had a few people tell me that things we did and that were a major selling point of a really successful run of small games have never been done before, or are impossible. I’ve had people tell me that you’d never get enough people to run a game like that.

I would like to dismiss it as unimportant. However, I suspect that letting a large part of my personal LRP history fade away is a bad plan, especially as it was my formative experience with running events, and it adds interesting background to my writing. I could review it, but given the nature of the game I couldn’t give you a true review of any of those events.

Britain has hundreds of small games, and a few much larger ones. If a game only has twenty players it’s going to get lost in the noise of all that is going on. I know about the games I am aware of mostly because my friends are running them. I know about the game history I am aware of because that’s the history of the people I play and run LRP games with. I’m lucky to know people who are involved in Curious Pastimes, Empire, Lorien Trust, The Vale, and Fools and Heroes. I also know people who are running a wide range of different small games. Some of which I’ll play and some of which I’m less interested in.

There are systems that I am interested in that aren’t run by people I know. I typically find out about these either because they’re shared by people who are my friends, or because these people post in places like UK LARP Events. The internet, and more specifically Facebook, is useful in this regard. It gives us much more access to the wider range of events, and allows us to find the ones that we want to play. Playing events that are interesting to you also tends to have a reciprocal effect in that once you get to know the organisers they find out about your games, and fairly often there is a crossover of interests there.

There are people who run events that I see advertising everywhere. When I mention these games to friends who LRP regularly they’re often utterly unaware of the games. There’s no foolproof way to advertise to LRPers, although LRPCon and Facebook seem to stand in for that. The community is both remarkably small, and surprisingly diverse. The connections between sections of the community are made organically and I’m fairly certain there are still at least three almost entirely unconnected communities of LRPers in the city I live in, so event advertising in the regional groups is less effective than it would otherwise be, because that’s nowhere near a comprehensive list of local LRPers.

I spend most of my free time involved in LRP in one way or another. I part own and run Mandala Studios in Coventry and have been running games through them for 5 or 6 years. I also crew Empire LRP. I have catered a variety of events and banquets and the events I run are a mix of genres (SciFi, Fantasy and stupid - next year I'm running a dinosaur event).